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“... story it was me. At 5.30 the next day Jamie arrived at my flat with his editorial colleague Nick Davies. (Mental health warning: there are two Nick Davies in this story. This one worked for Canongate; the second is a well-known reporter for the Guardian.) They had just come back on the train from Norfolk. Jamie said that ...”

“... of the Twenties, Thirties and Forties. There are virtuoso pages like 71, where Henry James and Edmund Gosse bicycle through the text (‘Those were bicycle times ... The Time Machine with its saddle was itself a transfigured bicycle. Wells’s third novel The Wheels of Chance (1896), had been all about bicyclists’). The book offers a cornucopia ...”

“... Misanthropocene). It has already ‘picked up a variety of incompatible meanings’, as Jeremy Davies, a professor of English at Leeds, observes in The Birth of the Anthropocene, perhaps the best guide so far to the different senses and timeframes attached to the term. Even so, a common intellectual function seems to unite the various usages and, often, a ...”

“... News International over the past year have given us many memorable moments, but Rupert and James Murdoch’s appearance before the Culture, Media and Sport Committee of the House of Commons last July is first among them. While James cut a predictably bitter figure, his octogenarian father could hardly have seemed ...”

“... Jos Sedley in the final chapter of Vanity Fair, but her guilt is strongly implied. Is Henry James’s nameless governess in The Turn of the Screw a heroic and blameless victim of evil, or a deranged child-killer? In denying us certainty, James trades on the ambiguities inherent in her profession. Sheridan Le Fanu’s ...”

“... films as Gandhi (a severe treatment of the Raj), A Passage to India, and Heat and Dust, even the James Bond spectacular Octopussy, kept the Indian sub-continent securely in the public’s imagination. One of the most triumphant television productions of the decade was ITV’s dramatisation of Paul Scott’s ‘Raj Quartet’ under the title The Jewel in the ...”

“... Virgin Mary. Even the joust made a stylised come-back. In the 1840s, on the present-day site of James Stirling’s Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart. Swabian aristocrats dressed up as crusading knights and Saracens to stage a tourney using original weapons, complete with pages, squires and a back-drop of lemon trees especially imported for the occasion. This was ...”

“... privilege of having proper and fruitful conversations with the Dame (Evelyn Sharp), the late Sir James Waddell and others. Equally, as members of the Labour Delegation to the European Parliament, John Prescott and I were ‘educated in the ways of Upper Whitehall’ by Sir Thomas Brimelow, the former PUS at the Foreign Office, who became a Labour Peer and a ...”

“... decision-making to the practical needs of the financial situation of the family’. Indeed, James Prichard devised the category of ‘moral insanity’ as a diagnosis (an ‘ambiguous modification of insanity’, he called it) expressly tailored to the needs of wealthy families keen to deprive relatives who were troublesome, but not insane by the usual ...”

“... children, and two sturdy older brothers were already established as the focus of family ambition. James was a puny child, distinguished by neither athletic nor academic prowess. His brother David was his mother’s favourite. Tall, handsome, destined for university and eventually the ministry, he was killed in a skating accident shortly before his 14th ...”

“... Cavendish Square, north of Oxford Street, but still retained a mansion of 50 rooms in St James’s Square, along with other properties. As a man of commerce he invested in everything from coal to oysters, from soap to slaving, none of which commended him to Old Money. The dukes of Richmond, descended from a royal mistress, notoriously reaped a ...”

“... on by Hamlet in staging the play that catches the conscience of King Claudius. George Buchanan, James I’s tutor, saw the depiction of tyranny in his own tragedies as an instrument of James’s education. The blunt couplets of The Mirror for Magistrates supplied vivid warnings of the destruction that awaits kings and ...”

“... caused an outburst of public indignation in Britain. When it emerged that the Home Secretary, Sir James Graham, had authorised the opening of Mazzini’s correspondence, he was attacked in Parliament for resorting to ‘the spy system of foreign states’ and Carlyle wrote to the Times that opening of men’s letters was ‘a practice near of kin to picking ...”

“... lobbyists and pro-corporate think tanks that refuse to declare their donors. The company is run by James Frayne, a long-standing ally of Cummings, and Rachel Wolf, who co-wrote the 2019 Conservative manifesto. Having previously run focus groups for the Department for International Trade and the Cabinet Office, Public First has been given contracts worth more ...”

“... understaffed, the Bari base – under the command, as it happens, of another Communist, Major James Klugman – had to decode and re-encode all traffic between Frank and Cairo in both directions. The matter of the code-books was at last sorted out, just before Frank and Sergeant Scott crossed the frontier into Bulgaria, when they were immediately involved ...”